The NOLA tv saga - Memorial Day 2005
aka "How Far Will DL Go To Make This Happen?"
First a brief bit of backstory: in February 2004, after the Wolfram & Hart party, Allyson suggested that we hold a kind of "Bronzer reunion" the following year but do it in the summer and not in LA, as we no longer needed to cater to the whims of anyone involved with a tv show. I'm pretty sure she also suggested New Orleans as a location. Everyone in the room loved the idea – it wasn't LA, many of us had never been there, doing it over Memorial Day seemed like a plan.
I also remember pointing out that by May of 2005, the documentary would most likely be finished (ha) and it would be ready to be shown. We could incorporate the premiere screening into the weekend. I've been working on the documentary to that end ever since. That weekend was to be the first unveiling to a large group of Bronzers, even though the doc still has technical work it needs, so it's not officially finished yet.
The screening ended up being slated to take place in my hotel room over the weekend. The week before NOLA I consulted with some of the geek boys and some friends and I brought the DVD of the documentary, a portable DVD player, a multitude of cables and an RF adaptor with me. I was prepared, I thought, for any contingency.
I arrived in NOLA and encountered a blind man in a wheelchair with a seeing eye dog in the line for the shuttle bus. I spent a good 15 minutes sitting on the van waiting for the employees to decide whether to put the blind guy and his dog in with us or onto the next van.
Looking back, that really was the indicator of what the weekend would be like.
We finally left the airport and I was getting nervous. Polgara and I were going to watch the "Lost" and "Alias" finales together at because New Orleans is in Central Time, they started at 7pm. At 6:20 she called me anxiously, "Have you been kidnapped?"
My response, and I am not making this up: "There's a parade!"
Yes, as we wove our way through the French Quarter, there was a parade. A mercifully short parade (only about one block long) but still, police escort, large crowd of people walking slowly down the street. Our van driver made a heroic effort but we still had to sit and wait for the parade to pass us by.
(For the record, I did arrive at the hotel in time to spend three hours screaming at the tv.)
I checked into my room and pulled out all the tech and toys I had packed that had weighed my suitcase down. I pulled the tv out and started poking around. All my preparation was for nothing, since none of the tvs in the rooms had any kind of input jacks on them. There was no way to hook anything up to the tv.
I tried talking calmly, and then not so calmly, with the hotel staff, who insisted that all their conference rooms were booked solid for the weekend (true, although the rooms were frequently not in use) and that they (meaning the front desk) couldn't let me use any of the tvs that the conference staff had on hand because they didn't have the "authority." Those tvs, by the way, were DVD compatible and at least one of them was sitting underneath a staircase uselessly most of the weekend.
I was pretty much veering from panic to total despair most of Friday and Saturday. I had been promising people this for so long, I was furious with myself for not making it happen. It wasn't that I thought people would be angry – a tech fuck up is something that happens to pretty much everyone and it's nobody's fault. But the head/desk frustration of dealing with the hotel staff and having people keep asking me when the screening was just put me right on edge.
Finally on Saturday afternoon, after I had a good couple hours of time to fume and brood in private, Leather Jacket said, "Why not just go buy a tv and return it?"
Bastion Ridley and Little Sister's Boy had been suggesting things like Rent-A-Center for the past couple days, but places like that require contracts and forms. Plus I only knew one person in town who definitely had a car, and no clue where a Rent-A-Center might be. And when LJ suggested it, I first said, "No...." Then I thought about it for a bit and realized this wasn't going to happen if I just sat around on my ass waiting for a solution to fall from the sky.
So I got a lift from a local to the WalMart and purchased a 20" Emerson flat screen tv. I was tempted to pause in the lobby so the desk staff could see the box. We set it up in my room, screened the documentary for about a dozen people on Sunday afternoon, and Monday on our way out of town, 'stina and I returned the tv to WalMart, where I told them it was too big for the space I had available.
The big knot in my stomach that had been there all weekend didn't really unclench until we were driving through the middle of the swamp on our way to Houston on Monday afternoon, having successfully screened the film and taken the tv back. I kept thinking of something Camryn Manheim said in Wake Up, I'm Fat!: A year earlier I might have thrown my hands up and surrendered in defeat. But I was driven by a strange new force that was compelling me to fight this battle. I'd heard about this so-called muse and always nodded knowingly when others had talked about theirs, but for the first time I was feeling the power of my own. And she was mighty.
My muse has been kicking ass and taking names since I started this project. She had to, or we would never have gotten this far.
It was barely four months later that Hurricane Katrina laid New Orleans, as well as Biloxi, Gulfport and much of the Gulf Coast to waste. Having the sights and sounds of the city fresh in my mind has made watching the news coverage much more stressful than it would have otherwise been. Please consider making a donation to the American Red Cross or some of the other aid organizations working to bring relief and support to the victims, not just in New Orleans but across the Gulf states.